This is another one of my favorites that I try to watch every year. I had it in my mind one year, I think it was last year, that I was going to analyze it carefully and dissect it and understand what it was "really about," but I think that might he missing the point. I think a lot of the imagery in this movie is creepy, and the more you try to distill what's creepy about it, the less scary it gets.
The movie is about a doctor who uses a somnambulist (a hypnotized man walking in his sleep) in a sideshow. He claims the man can predict the future, but the man predicts crimes which then come true, making him the prime suspect. Upon further investigation, however, it becomes clear that the doctor is behind the plot, using the hypnotized man to do his bidding. Creepy, right?
There are a lot of twists and turns in the story that I don't want to spoil, but clearly, nothing is as it seems in the movie. There's a lot of twisted imagery, shadow and light, and the town in the story is presented with lots of slanted lines and twisted passageways that make it seem very nightmarish. The plot is a story within a story within yet another story, and there's an unreliable narrator telling the story, so everything is presented through his skewed view of events. Whether you try to pick it apart or not, it stands as a great example of experimental cinema, and a good movie to revisit on a dark and stormy night.
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